Fire and rain: A new collaboration on the effects of fire on storm runoff in Spain and British Columbia

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This NSERC Catalyst project is a new collaboration with Professor Artemi Cerdà, the top fire hydrology researcher in the world. Through on-the ground visits and in-person collaborative meetings, I will learn first-hand from these groups about their experiments at their field sites in Spain. I will then import these methods, approaches and knowledge back to Canada for research to be applied across watersheds in BC. In exchange with these groups, I will share research approaches using isotope hydrology tracing that they have not yet tried in their attempts to trace the fate of rainfall on burned land. The specific objectives of the project are to: (i) begin isotope data collection at the Sierra de Enguera Soil Erosion Experimental Station; (ii) plan the design of similar runoff plots on recently burned land in BC Canada; and, (iii) conduct lab experiments with imported Spanish soil at the Multi-purpOse Slope Testing (MOST) Facility at the University of Saskatchewan. I plan to use a portion of my sabbatical from September 2023 - April 2024 to visit Professor Artemi Cerdà's lab as well as several other groups in the Valencia region who specialize in wildfire impacts on hydrology. Others I plan to visit include Esther Peña-Molina and Manuel Esteban Lucas-Borja at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha; and Antonio del Campo and his colleagues at Universitat Politecnica de Valencia. This work has major implication for Canada where fire, exacerbated by climate change, is a rapidly growing threat. The Fall 2021 flooding in BC that made international headlines is very likely Canada's largest insurable disaster. Many more will follow in future years. This Catalyst project will focus on the key player in fire-flood disasters, namely the fire impact on soil infiltrability and resulting increases in surface runoff and the rapid delivery of rainfall into streams